The nightmare started when I was five. I was at primary school when I suddenly couldn’t move my legs.

My mother was sent for and I was taken home and put to bed. Doctors couldn’t fathom what was wrong with me.

The penny finally dropped after a visit to A&E. I was suffering from Type 1 diabetes.

It’s a condition I’ve lived with for 55 years. It’s not uncommon – 18,000 people in Scotland suffer from it – but it can easily be a killer and managing it is something you have to do every hour of the day.

There’s still no cure. But a remarkable new treatment I’ve just had at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary is taking me a lot closer.

This procedure is one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the century.

Type 1 diabetes has to be controlled by insulin injections because the body has obliterated its own islet cells. No insulin production equals death.

But that brings the opposite danger – that you have too much insulin in your system, so your blood glucose drops too low. It’s called hypoglycaemia.

This is also dangerous. It can lead to mood changes. I might be very aggressive or incredibly weepy. I’ll be incoherent at least.

In the past I’ve collapsed, broken my cheekbone, burned the skin off myself in the shower, smashed part of my skull, fractured an ankle, sliced my arm open with a milk bottle and given myself countless black eyes.

Another side-effect of low blood sugar is that I can appear to be drunk. As a journalist, I was once trying to set up an interview with US President Bill Clinton. I went hypo during the call, and the White House phoned my bosses to complain I was inebriated.

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Often I can’t remember anything about the incident. Having a hypo is easily sorted – I just need to be given sugar of some sort, such as a soft drink. I’m back round and fine within minutes.

But this needs to be done quickly or it can become massively serious. More than 1800 people a year in the UK alone die as a result of low blood sugars.

Now, thanks to the brilliant doctors, nurses and staff at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, all this – for now at least – is a thing of the past for me.

Replacement islet cells from a donor pancreas have been infused directly into my liver.

They now provide me with the insulin production I need for a normal life. It’s an amazing procedure which offers hope to millions of Type 1 diabetics.

But it’s expensive to perform and still at quite an early stage – it only started being offered in the UK about 10 years ago.

Just over 50 of these transplants have been carried out in Edinburgh. Across all seven regional centres in the UK able to do it, there have been only 152 up until November 2015. It always takes time for new technologies in medicine to become normal practice.

Once I was approved for the procedure – that involved several months of ongoing tests and tissue typing – I was told to be available on my mobile phone 24 hours a day, so I could be rushed in to the ERI before the donor pancreas degraded. While you’re travelling in and being prepared for theatre, the donor pancreas has the islets cells taken out and cleaned, washed and counted.

The treatment lets her live her life without worry (Image: Justin Kernoghan)

Not all organs have enough cells to transplant – my first operation had to be cancelled at the last minute because of this.

The next time, though, it was all systems go. The procedure is simple and, although done in an operating theatre, doesn’t involve surgery.

The islet cells are infused into the liver with a needle then a cannula. In less than an hour, I was back on the ward.

As with all transplant patients, one of the biggest risks is that your body will reject the cells or organ. I was given huge doses of immune suppressants to stop this happening.

One short-term side-effect is it means I’m highly vulnerable to infection, so I need to be careful to avoid big crowds or infectious children. For six months or so, I need to avoid unpasteurised food.

After three days careful monitoring, I was out of hospital with the warning that it would probably be a couple of weeks before I’d notice any change in my insulin needs. In fact, I was reducing my insulin within a few days. Within a week, I needed no injected insulin at all.

Maggie no longer needs insulin injections

A warning though – this freedom from insulin injections may not last forever or even very long at all.

It’s a wait-and- see exercise. I may need a second transplant and even then, there’s no guarantee I will be insulin-free.

For now, I have the incredible liberation of being able to eat pretty much what I want, confident that my new cells will produce the insulin I need.

I’ll always be grateful to Scotland’s brilliant NHS for allowing me this new chance to push back this debilitating and all-consuming condition.

It has literally changed the way I live, and those of others too – my husband, for instance, will no longer have the stress of bringing me out of those dark, dangerous and damaging hypos.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go and eat some chocolate fudge pudding…

The symptoms

DIABETES UK encourage people to be aware of the 4 Ts – the most common signs and symptoms of Type 1 diabetes:

Toilet Going to the toilet a lot, bed wetting by a previously dry child or heavier nappies in babies